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We're already starting to see some cool samples that use Silverlight 2 really effectively. Prior to MIX, we had a small private beta running to get some early feedback on the builds that we were producing, and a few folk made really good use of this time to build some interesting ideas out. This one is one of my favorites: TextGlow is a Silverlight 2 application that reads Word .docx files. The Open XML format is an ECMA-ratified standard, and having a web-based runtime with the power Silverlight makes it possible to accomplish something that I don't think you could do easily with any other technology. TextGlow downloads Word documents asynchronously, opens them as ZIP files, parses them with LINQ-to-XML and then renders them using the WPF-based text and graphics APIs. This is a big deal, and not just because it's a cool Silverlight sample. In years gone by, if you wanted to share a document on the web, you'd typically have converted it to PDF format (assuming you had the full version of Read More...
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After three public preview releases, I'm proud to announce the final version of Video.Show , a ready-to-run solution for hosting video content on the web! You might be interested in Video.Show if: Your company or school wants to distribute e-learning or educational content over the web for internal or external access; You're creating the next YouTube-style site and you want somewhere to start; You want to share home movies with your family and friends via your own personal site, rather than uploading them to somewhere public like YouTube or MSN Soapbox; You're running a conference or event and you want to make the materials available for anyone else to watch; You're a hosting provider and you want to offer your customers a way to store and share videos; You simply want to learn how to build a great AJAX web site experience with Microsoft technologies. We built Video.Show to enable all the above scenarios and many more! Getting started with Video.Show is easy: all you need is a machine with Read More...
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Around the world, people are preparing to gather together to celebrate the holiday season, to give and receive gifts and to sing carols. This year sees the start of a new tradition that our children and our grandchildren will preserve and pass on: the sending of Silverlight-enhanced Christmas cards! I've received some fun ones - thanks to those who have shared them with me. Here are a few: Season's Greetings from Microsoft UK Online Spotlight, Norway Happy Holidays from ObjectSharp FranksWorld Special Presentation Anyone else got a cool Silverlight Christmas card to share? Read More...
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Here's a cool little Silverlight 1.0 application that our team (specifically Adam ) assisted with over the last week. In the run-up to Christmas, I'm sure a lot of us are told that we're "hard to buy for". Wouldn't it be nice if there was some way to give our friends and family a few gentle pointers without having to spoil all the surprise by being prescriptive down to the stock keeping unit level? Enter the Christmas CoolWall . Adopting an idea from the wonderful auto-related Top Gear television program from BBC TV, the CoolWall allows you to find images of different items and sort them into categories of "Seriously Uncool", "Uncool", "Cool" and "Sub-Zero". You can also annotate the images with comments ("the Halo soundtrack is cool, but not on cassette tape please"). Having built a cool wall, you can save it, copy it as an image, or send it via email to a friend. All this is, of course, built in Silverlight 1.0. The application Read More...
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You may be pleased to know that we've just updated Video.Show with a bunch of changes. The 1.0 Release Candidate build is now available for your downloading pleasure from Codeplex. If you haven't seen Video.Show before, I'd encourage you to check it out. Vertigo (the company who we commissioned to build this) have a great web-site with further information and plenty of screenshots. Notable changes in the RC build include: Role management , allowing for hosted installations in which new users do not have upload rights. Users now fall into one of three categories: untrusted users (who can create comments but aren't able to upload videos); trusted users (who also have the "upload user" right), and an administrator role (who can manage other users' roles). This is built using the ASP.NET Membership technology. Basic debugging information is written to the database when video processing (encode, upload to Silverlight Streaming) fails. This is an interim solution; we have longer-term Read More...
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One of the favorite things about my job is being able to share really cool new content with you all, and so today is a good day to end the week on! Since we completed the Family.Show WPF reference sample, we've been working away in partnership with a great developer team from Vertigo Software on a Silverlight video scenario, and today is the day when we get to open it up to the developer community in the form of a first public beta. Video.Show is an end-to-end solution that provides a reference-quality sample for user-generated video content sites. Taking advantage of all of our latest technologies: .NET Framework 3.5 , ASP.NET AJAX , LINQ , Silverlight , Expression Encoder and Silverlight Streaming , Video.Show provides support for uploading, encoding, tagging, viewing and commenting on videos. Since not many people are building video sites like YouTube that have millions of videos, we've optimized the experience for sites with tens to thousands of videos. The version published today is Read More...
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Thanks to Adam Kinney (again!) for this awesome Halloween greetings card, brought to you by Silverlight and Silverlight Streaming. The full source code can be found on Adam's blog . Read More...
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Adam Kinney wrote a good blog entry last week on the importance for site authors of considering the first-time experience of a visitor. I guess most readers of this blog have Silverlight installed today, but at least in these first months as we focus on getting the plug-in broadly deployed, it's particularly important that site authors take care to test the experience of a visitor who doesn't already have Silverlight on their machine. The Silverlight installation process itself is fairly straightforward: we've done everything possible to minimize the number of clicks between site visit and first-time control instantiation, but our own work with early adopter sites has shown there are best practices that can greatly improve the user experience. To that end, here are a few helpful tips: Use the inplaceInstallPrompt:true parameter in CreateSilverlight.js to present the Silverlight installer directly from the current home page rather than redirecting the end-user to the Silverlight site for Read More...
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As a great example of what you can do today with Silverlight 1.0, I thought I'd bring this sample application, developed by Novera Consulting, to everyone's attention. I first met up with these guys when they responded to my invitation to attend a Silverlight issue-resolution lab that we ran a couple of months ago. In many ways, they're a great demonstration of the value of running labs like this - both of us gained hugely from the interaction and feedback. Incidentally, we're running another similar lab in a month - do you have a Silverlight 1.0-based site that you're working on that you'd like to work with us on? The Novera election site can be found here : after selecting your party, you proceed to a page that looks like the screenshot above, where you can see each of the different candidates, information about their campaign and funding, as well as a link to a cool campaign trail visualization which was created as a Virtual Earth mash-up. In some ways, the app feels like a high-end Read More...
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Now that the API-complete RC releases of Silverlight have been out for a couple of weeks, most developers have moved their Silverlight-based applications over to the new build. Here's an updated list of 50+ samples and applications that run on the Release Candidate builds: 2D Physics Engine , Amazon Search Visualization , Ant Attack , AOL Social Mail Gadget , Beatboxing , Bubble Factory , Bubblemark , Color Picker , Comic Book Viewer , Destroy All Invaders , Digger , Discovery Channel Never Miss TV , DotNetNuke Video Module , Dr Popper , EuroJobWeb , Flowers-For-You , Glyph Map , GOA WinForms Demo , Grand Piano , Infragistics Controls Demo , InkPresenter , JavaScript / .NET Chess , JellyGraph , Khet , Laugh-o-Sphere , Layout Controls , Line Graph , Major League Baseball , Michael’s Journal , Monotone , Nibbles Tutorials , Office Ribbon , Popfly , Python Console , Reflection Builder , Reflector for Silverlight , ReMIX07 Tokyo , Roxio Buzz , Silverlight Airlines Demo , Silverlight Chess Game Read More...
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It's great to see so many Silverlight-based widgets, samples, demos and applications appearing out there. I spent a happy hour this morning searching around the Internet for examples and samples, and thought I'd aggregate the fruits of my research below. If you've just installed Silverlight on your machine and want to see it "do" something, click around the fifty links below to explore. Some of these samples require the Silverlight 1.1 alpha release ( Windows install / Mac install ), so if you get an error, try installing the 1.1 release. (Incidentally, the 1.1 alpha release contains the 1.0 beta bits, so you just need to install from the link above and you're good to go.) 2D Physics Simulation Grand Piano Silverlight Mind Map 3D Teapot Demo Infragistics Controls Demo Silverlight Pad Amazon Search Visualization JavaScript / .NET Chess Silverlight Playground AOL Social Mail Gadget Laugh-o-Sphere Silverlight Rocks Binary Clock LiveStation SilverNibbles Browser Poker Matrix Digital Rain Smalltalk Read More...
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The Silverlight 1.1 alpha bits don't currently have much in the way of controls. The infrastructure is there (you can derive from System.Windows.Control, for instance), and we include a few early sample controls (button, slider and so on, including source code) with the SDK, but the full set of controls won't come until the next public release. In the meantime, Tim Heuer pointed me at an interesting set of controls that have been developed by an organization called NETiKA Technologies. If you go to this demo page , you'll see that they've somehow taken a pretty broad set of Windows Forms controls and implemented them for Silverlight (and Flash). Or at least, I think that's what they've done. It's not entirely clear what's going on under the covers here, since the code you write starts off as a Windows Forms application that the toolkit cross-compiles to Silverlight. The demos are pretty impressive - a little slow (it is alpha code running on alpha code, to be fair), but particularly the Read More...
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Celso Gomes is an amazing interactive designer working at Microsoft who is responsible for the beautiful sample applications that ship with Expression Blend and did some of the earliest design explorations for Silverlight. Now he's come up with Nibbles : a series of "snack tutorials for hungry designers" that cover the use of Expression Blend to build WPF and Silverlight content. The site itself is a stunning example of Silverlight, with faded animations and transitions and accordion bars: it makes my own work seem feeble by comparison. Make sure you check it out - it's inspiring... Read More...
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As we were pretty explicit in declaring at the MIX conference last month, one of the key scenarios for Silverlight 1.0 is delivering rich video experiences. But since the word "rich" is something of a cliché in the web world, I wanted to give a small example of what this means in reality. To include a video file in your Silverlight application, you simply add a line like the following within the XAML content: < MediaElement x:Name = " Video " Width = " 320 " Height = " 180 " Source = " sample.wmv " /> This creates a pretty raw player, but you can then add a custom skin for the player, along with event handlers to add playback control, handle download or buffering, adjust volume or balance, retrieve metadata, or trigger an action on a timeline marker being reached. If you happen to use Expression Media Encoder (currently a free beta) to re-encode your video file, you can have it automatically generate a skin based on a variety of templates - and indeed you can then use Expression Blend Read More...
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In my last post , I promised to provide a more detailed technical explanation of how you can use the .NET capabilities of Silverlight with HTML, allowing full access to the HTML DOM from managed code as well as providing a means for client-side JavaScript to call into a .NET library. All the magic necessary to accomplish this is contained in a new .NET namespace introduced with Silverlight 1.1, called System.Windows.Browser. Here you'll find a number of classes that enable you to manipulate the DOM, in particular HtmlPage (representing the parent browser); HtmlDocument (the root element of the DOM) and HtmlElement (for manipulating the individual elements within a page). Using these methods, it's possible to create an HTML page where all the underlying code logic is written in a language like C# without having to write so much as an event handler in JavaScript. Let's walk through the process. I'm going to assume that you've got a machine already set up with Visual Studio 2008 Beta 1 (previously Read More...
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